What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

Our teacher thought many of the shots from 'The Story of an Hour' were clumsy and not well thought out. She also didn't feel as though they wee best to our ability. It was obvious that we were not motivated or passionate about what we were creating, and so because of this our film suffered. It was then that we decided we needed a new challenging idea. 

We continually asked our teacher and target audience for feedback when creating 'Blur'. We used networking sites including Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter to gain feedback, which was very important as it helped us progress and develop our products throughout the duration of research and planning. 

Facebook. 

Facebook has been our main platform when communicating with our target audience.  Facebook has allowed us to embed videos from youtube, post screenshots from the film and pictures of our review page and poster to gain audience comments, whether good or bad.  Not all of my friends on facebook/people who commented and gave opinions are passionate about film.  Some had a general interest, others more passionate.  This gave us a wider scope of opinions on our products so that we could really develop our film

Above is an example of a post Miranda posted on facebook when creating our poster. The comment posted suggests we change the background colour as it makes the smaller text hard to read. We however felt as though this colour suited the letters but agreed that the text had become difficult to read and so we went away and changed the text colour. It becomes hard to judge your own work, and so this feedback was vital for Miranda to make any changes and to make sure we were keeping within our target audience. 

The first draft of our film also gained feedback from facebook. Below is a screenshot. 

Although our first draft had patches, our audience generally seemed to really like it. They loved how the editing flowed smoothly and the calming effects the footage had on them. Their only criticism was that the music became a little repetitive. When creating the second draft we took this feedback into account and focused on gaining the extra footage and re-drafting the music. From this feedback we were able to improve what we already had, and it taught us that our audience want more of the bokeh effect, and to keep the professionality of the footage. 

Although the feedback from Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr was minimum, we were able to post regularly on these to create interest and promote not only our film but the other products too. As Facebook seemed to have more interest we decided to post as much as we could here. 

While it is important to gain a wide range of opinions from people with different passions and backgrounds, I also asked my teachers and class colleagues.  I was gaining some general statements of "I like this", which are non-detailed responses.  From my teachers and colleagues, I could get detailed criticisms which focused on "what worked" well and "even better ifs".  This helped us to keep on track, and to continually develop our products.  

From our first draft we have made the following changes to our products due to audience feedback:

• Soundtrack - we have made the music less repetitive, and more uplifting, yet maintaining the flow and rhythm of the piece.  
• We made sure that the theme and style of our film was maintained throughout our piece, and that all the shots were at the same level as each other
• We also posted screenshots from our film onto facebook, and asked them to vote which image would be perfect for a poster.  We then used the images that the audience picked and used them on our final poster.  
• We changed the font colour on the poster so that the audience can read the text.